I want to bring to this discussion perhaps a slightly new perspective. Maybe WE have changed. I’m in my 40’s and I still recall listening to my elders back in my childhood lamenting how things had changed. Granted they weren’t talking about the cruisy scene, but just like everything else things change. I grew up near Atlanta and know this city has changed at least as dramatically as any. The Varsity is about the only thing left from the days when I was growing up in a nearby town. Why shouldn’t cruising options change, too?

Fundamentally we know that one thing has not and will not change: men are still out there cruising for sex. Maybe they’re just doing it differently in such an extraordinary way that many of us ‘old-timers’ can’t seem to catch up anymore. I certainly used to love dirty bookstore sex, but these days about the only thing I find in them when I venture into one in a major city are men who either are too old to know how to operate a computer or too broke to own one. It certainly wasn’t that way back in ‘my day’.

I do predict one thing: change will continue. On that we can be sure. I further predict that the flight away from real world to cyber world hookups is already in decline and people are slowly returning to the real world to meet one another. I also predict that if we are entering a time of economic decline in the USA we will see a new proliferation in real world sex venues. So much of what we lost in the last 15 or 20 years came about for one primary reason: the real estate boom both in spreading ‘burbs and also in center cities. That boom seriously impacted so many adult businesses that disappeared and so many parks that, at one time had been remote but suddenly became popular with yuppies.

All things change, and the cruising scene is changing all the time, too. The Atlanta sex scene is alive and well. Some of us just have a tough time finding it because we’re looking for it in all the old ways and old places.

Quote |